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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
Because, even though they broke them on a fairly regular basis, they had rules they played by. If Britain flies various neutral flags, the Germans start sinking all neutrals and the Brits take the blame for messing with what's accepted. "It's just not cricket, old boy".
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Right!
In addition at the beginning of the war supposedly neutral single ships were stopped by the uboats (as opposed to merchants in convoys who were always attacked no matter what nationality), and the ID was verified. If the ship was indeed neutral it was allowed to leave unharmed. So called "Prisenordnung". Later in the war this was no longer done, because it proved to be too dangerous since the Brits deployed heavy weaponry on small merchants running under neutral flags (under false pretense of course) but kept the guns hidden or disguised, so that any uboat that tried to stop them was immediatly attacked by several guns. Those were called the "U-Boot Fallen (uboat traps) Although I don't know if any uboat had ever been sunk by such a uboat trap, I'm fairly sure this led to abandoning the "Prisenordnung".